The province of Maine, which had been a part of Massachusetts since its purchase from the heirs of Gorges in 1677, had long been eager to be formed into a separate state. It finally won the consent of the legislature of Massachusetts, and at the opening of Congress in December, 1819, applied, with a free-state constitution already formed, for admission to the Union. The House promptly passed the bill admitting Maine. The Senate committee, however, added to the Maine bill a provision for the admission of Missouri without any restriction in regard to slavery. After an exciting debate of a month in the Senate, Thomas of Illinois proposed as an amendment to the part of the bill touching Missouri that slavery be forever excluded from all the Louisiana Purchase territory north of latitude 36° 30′ (the southern boundary of Missouri), except in the proposed state of Missouri itself. Fourteen of the twentytwo senators from the slave states voted for the Thomas amendment. The House at first rejected the Thomas amendment, repassing the bill for the admission of Missouri with the Tallmadge amendment by a vote of 91 to 82; but after a conference with the Senate enough Northern votes were won to carry the Thomas clause. The final vote in the House on the Compromise was 90 to 87. The fourteen Congressmen from the free states who joined the unanimous delegation of Southerners in voting for the Missouri Compromise were actuated by honorable motives, but the caustic John Randolph contemptuously dubbed them "dough-faces”—a name thereafter applied to Northern men who supported the proslavery measures of the South. On March 3, 1820, President Monroe signed the bill admitting Maine as a free state, and three days later the

1They believed that compromise was necessary to save the Union, and that the South had shown great generosity in accepting the Thomas amendment, which closed nine tenths of the Louisiana Purchase territory to slavery. Furthermore, the consent of Massachusetts to the separation of Maine was conditioned on the admission of Maine to the Union before March 4, 1820. Perhaps some of the Northern Republicans were induced to vote for the Compromise, by the fear that the Federalists, led by Rufus King, would get back into power on the issue of slavery restriction.

bill authorizing Missouri to frame a constitution without any restriction of slavery.1

The full importance of the Missouri Compromise appears only in the light of the history of the generation following. For the moment it seemed to have settled the controversy over slavery and thwarted the formation of new political parties on that issue. Regarded as a cowardly surrender of principles by zealots on both sides of Mason and Dixon's line, like Tallmadge and Randolph, the Compromise stimulated abolitionist sentiment in the North and fortified the doctrine of states' rights in the South. It revived the agitation over the ethics of slaveholding, which had been rather in abeyance since the debates of the Constitutional Convention and thoroughly quieted with the passage of the law forbidding the slave trade. It revealed with startling clearness to the North, where slavery was rapidly nearing extinction, how firmly the economic consequences of the invention of the cotton gin (enormously accelerated production, clamor for new lands, trebling of the price of sound negroes) had fixed the institution on the South. It connected the question of the restriction or extension of slavery with westward expansion. By sanctioning the line of 36° 30' between slavery and freedom in our Western territory, it empha

1 The actual admission of Missouri was delayed for more than a year because the House objected to clauses in the proposed constitution which discriminated against free negroes. Henry Clay engineered the final compromise, by which Missouri was admitted (August 10, 1821) on agreeing that no clause of her constitution should ever "be construed to authorize the passage of any laws. . . by which any citizen of either of the states of the Union shall be excluded from the enjoyment of any of the privileges and immunities to which said citizen is entitled under the Constitution of the United States."

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2 John Quincy Adams writes in his "Diary" (Vol. VI, p. 529): "The discussion of the Missouri question . . . revealed the basis for a new organization of parties. Here was a new party ready formed . . . threatening in its immediate effect that southern domination which had swayed the Union for the last 20 years." All through the long period of electioneering for the presidential campaign of 1824 there were fears among the followers of Clay north of the Ohio that the Missouri question would be revived and that under the slogan "No slavery" the Northwest would be stampeded to Adams.

sized the sectional rivalry and helped to detach the new states of the Northwest (Indiana and Illinois) from their sympathy with the agrarian communities of the South and join them to the manufacturing and commercial communities of the East. The free-soil motive became for the first time an integrating principle from Boston Harbor to the banks of the upper Mississippi.

Contemporary statesmen maintained that the Missouri Compromise saved the Union, but it is not difficult for us to see the germs of disunion in the measure. It deliberately divided the national house against itself. The control of the territories by Congress was not the point at issue. All the members of Monroe's cabinet, including Calhoun, agreed to that doctrine. Every Southerner in the House voted for it in the Missouri bill. The controverted question was whether Congress could put restrictions on a new state about to enter the Union. The Tallmadge amendment embodied that doctrine. It failed to pass the Senate, by a vote of 16 to 22, four Northern men voting against it. Had these men from Illinois, Massachusetts, and Pennsylvania supported the amendment, it would have passed the Senate and in all probability have been signed by the President. Congress then, with its increasing free-soil representation, could have made the prohibition of slavery the condition for the admission of future states until there were enough free states in the Union to secure the passage of an amendment to the Constitution abolishing slavery. This program, to be sure, might have met with opposition and been thwarted in ways which we cannot see, but its initial failure in the case of Missouri wrecked whatever chance there was for the peaceable abolition of slavery. This is the immense significance of the Missouri Compromise. "It contributed towards making the war of 1861 an historic necessity."

It seems at first sight strange that the very year which witnessed the final stormy debates on the Missouri Compromise should have marked also the culmination of the "era of good feelings," in the virtually unanimous reëlection of James Monroe

to the presidency. The logical outcome of the Missouri struggle would have been the formation of a proslavery states'-rights party in the South to oppose the free-soil trend of the North. Yet such a party was some years in forming: Attachment to the Union was strong on both sides of Mason and Dixon's line. The generous enthusiasm with which statesmen of both sections had given themselves to plans for national aggrandizement after the War of 1812 was still working powerfully. The Virginian president continued to recommend protection for manufactures in his messages of 1821, 1822, and 1823, and he was supported not only by Henry Clay of Kentucky but also by Senator Hayne of South Carolina. Although the comprehensive bill for the upkeep of the national Cumberland Road was vetoed by Monroe in the spring of 1822, the opposition proceeded rather from scruples as to the powers of Congress under the Constitution to foster "internal improvements" than from any realization that the interests of the South were opposed to the encouragement of a surplus in the Treasury to be expended on the development of a free Northwest. Finally, the years immediately following the Missouri controversy were occupied with the discussion of important foreign questions, whose effect is always to sink domestic discord in the larger issue of national safety and prestige.

2

The turbulent events of the French Revolution and the rise and fall of Napoleon's dominion in Europe, which had exercised

1 No candidate ran against Monroe, who received all but one of the electoral votes. That one was cast for John Quincy Adams, for the purely sentimental reason that the elector wished to see reserved for George Washington alone the tribute of a unanimous choice.

2 Monroe in his long veto message argued the constitutional point with great earnestness, consistently maintaining the position that an amendment to the Constitution would remove his scruples. That the Westerners believed their interests thwarted by a mistaken political philosophy and not by any sectional opposition from the South is shown by the comments of the Western press. "There is a party of politicians at Washington," said an Ohio paper in July, 1823, "whose consciences are so tender or whose minds are so contracted that no general system of internal improvements can be anticipated from the councils of the nation until there is a radical change in the Executive Department."